General: Iran Planting Bombs In Iraq

U.S. Top Commander In Iraq Believes Tehran Helping Insurgents

(CBS/AP)  For U.S. soldiers fighting insurgents just south of Baghdad, Thursday's news from the Pentagon was sobering.

According to the United States' commanding general in Iraq, Iran has joined the war. Gen. George Casey said Iranians are planting roadside bombs that are killing U.S. soldiers, reports CBS News correspondent Lee Cowan.

"We are quite confident that the Iranians through their covert special ops forces are providing weapons, IED technology and training to Shia extremist groups in Iraq," Casey said at a Pentagon press conference with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld by his side.

Casey went so far as to accuse the Iranian government of helping mastermind the attacks.

"Now you would assume they're not doing that independently, that there is some central direction from somebody in Tehran," Casey said.

Iraq's National Security Advisor Mowaffak al-Rubaie said regardless of who is backing the insurgency, Iraq has to be able to stand on its own, Cowan reports.

"We need to avoid what I call dependency syndrome. We need to wean ourselves off this dependency," al-Rubaie says.

Rumsfeld said Casey had not yet had sufficient time to consult with the new Iraqi government, but that in any case the size of the U.S. force is likely to rise and fall in coming months, depending on political and security conditions.

"It will very likely not be a steady path down," Rumsfeld said. "It could very likely be a drawdown with an increase." Noting that there now are 126,900 U.S. troops in Iraq, he said: "It could very well go back up at some point. It very likely will go down and up and down and up depending on the circumstances and depending on the need."

Casey, who said more than once last year that he expected to see "fairly substantial" U.S. troop reductions during spring and summer of 2006, noted that the force has dropped from about 138,000 in March to 126,900 now.

"Whether that's 'fairly substantial' enough, I'll leave to your judgment," he said. "As I said, I think there will be continued gradual reductions here as the Iraqis take on a larger and larger role."

In other recent developments:

The Republican-controlled Senate on Thursday soundly rejected two Democratic attempts to urge withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, including an amendment to begin pulling out by the end of the year. GOP lawmakers accused the Democrats of wanting to abandon Iraq before the mission is complete, while Democrats said it is time for changes in Mr. Bush's failed Iraq strategy.

Two U.S. soldiers who vanished during an insurgent checkpoint attack and were later found slain had been left alone while other vehicles in their patrol inspected traffic, the military said Thursday.

The U.S. military Thursday reported four Marines and a soldier were killed in operations south and west of Baghdad, and an explosion of sectarian and revenge killings in Iraq's third largest city over the past three days claimed 19 lives.

Iraqi police stormed a farm north of Baghdad early Thursday and freed at least 17 people who were snatched a day earlier in a mass kidnapping of about 85 workers and family members at the end of a factory shift.

Seven Marines and a Navy corpsman were charged Wednesday with premeditated murder in the shooting death of an Iraqi man who was pulled from his home and shot while U.S. troops hunted for insurgents. They could face the death penalty if convicted. All eight also were charged with kidnapping.

Lawyer Khamis al-Obeidi, a Sunni Arab who represented Saddam and his half brother Barzan Ibrahim, was abducted from his home Wednesday morning. His body was found riddled with bullets on a street near the Shiite slum of Sadr City. His widow, Um Laith, was quoted on The New York Times' Web site as saying the attackers wore civilian clothes. She said 20 men burst into their house while the couple and their children were sleeping, and identified themselves as members of an Interior Ministry security brigade.

Australian forces in Iraq will be shifting to a more dangerous role that could expose them to combat with insurgents, Prime Minister John Howard said Thursday. In a statement to Parliament, Howard formally set out details of the new deployment of Australian forces that will follow the handover of security responsibility to Iraqi forces in southern Muthana province and the withdrawal of Japanese troops.

Gen. Casey also said that members of the Sunni insurgency have been reaching out to the new Iraqi government, giving U.S. military commanders opportunities to forge communications with the resistance groups.

Casey said the U.S. military and the Iraqi government "have several different strands of contacts going on, and there are opportunities in that regard we just haven't had before." He did not elaborate. He also said the insurgency has grown more complex in recent months, and he complained that it has been assisted by Iranian special operations forces who provide bomb materials, weapons and training to Shiite extremists in southern Iraq.

"They are using surrogates to conduct terrorist operations in Iraq both against us and against the Iraqi people," Casey said. "It's decidedly unhelpful." He added there has been a "noticeable increase" in the problem since January, but he could not quantify it.

Casey also said Iran has become the main source of materials to make makeshift roadside bombs that regularly kill U.S. troops as well as Iraqis. "Those primarily come from Iran," he said. "We're seeing attacks and we're finding more of them. So it's coming in from, we believe, Iran."

©MMVI CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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